Douglas Todd: Happiness research is subversive

Copenhagen residents have five times more bikes than cars. According to studies, bicycling makes people feel better. Polls show Danes are all right with paying high taxes for infrastructure and support services. (Photo: A bike lane during rush hour in Copenhagen.)JOHAN SPANNER / NYT

I must be drawn to subversive people, to radical thinkers who walk softly and keep smiling while slowly turning upside down established institutions.

Four noted, good-natured subversives gathered this week at the University of B.C. for a panel titled Happiness How-To: From Happiness Research to Happier Cities. They have already made an impact around the globe, while believing there is much further to go.

The event was organized by the Vancouver School of Economics, particularly professor emeritus John Helliwell, who, at age 80, doesn’t recognize the word, retire. One of his projects is co-authoring the UN’s World Report on Happiness, through which he has produced studies of Canada’s most perky and gloomy cities (Vancouver and Toronto being the latter).

The good news is happiness research is actively threatening, in the nicest way possible, to reshape economics departments and governments; by changing the way they understand what really makes individuals and cities, from Vancouver to Beijing, successful.

Helliwell merrily opened the event by inviting audience members to greet each other, as well as sing If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands. He said he’s willing to “make a fool of myself” to illustrate the need to take well-being more seriously.

The first speaker was an American economist who Helliwell said was the first, in 1974, to dig into happiness research, before the field took off in the 1990s.

University of Southern California professor emeritus Richard Easterlin, now 92, told the audience that many economists initially reacted to the idea of measuring human-life satisfaction, as opposed to financial data, as “treasonous.”

Most economists, he said, are absorbed in measurements most people don’t really relate to, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the financial value of the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year.

Those blinders are in part why a glaring contradiction has emerged in China, Easterlin said. The booming nation, between 1990 and 2010, increased its per-capita GDP by four times. But measurements of Chinese people’s well-being found their happiness levels dropped by half.

Why? Easterlin explained that China’s residents had stronger job rights, pensions and relative wages in the 1990s. Decades later, even with unparalleled economic expansion, more workers are out of jobs and the social-safety net has eroded. Anxiety has mushroomed.

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The world has missed the grim emotional toll in China because “traditional economists don’t pay attention to what people actually say,” he said. They’re the opposite to psychologists, who measure well-being. Happiness research is effective because it brings together economics and social psychology.

Author Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, said Nordic countries consistently rank as the world’s happiest in large part because, despite endorsing marketplace competition, they also take care of their citizens in a way that reduces insecurity and fear.

Along with providing free higher education and solid pensions, Denmark’s politicians have developed tremendous transit and bicycling infrastructure. Copenhagen residents have five times more bikes than cars and 58 per cent of children cycle to school. According to studies, bicycling makes people feel better.

Studies also show Danes trust each other, said Wiking, author of the bestseller, The Little Book of Hygge. To the astonishment of the audience, Wiking illustrated everyday Danish trust with a photo of eight baby-filled strollers parked on a wintry sidewalk while mothers and fathers sat inside an adjacent café.

Danish society’s more egalitarian happiness comes at a price, of course. Wiking said Danes pay roughly half their earnings in taxes. But citizens buy into such wealth distribution, he said, with 88 per cent saying they’re satisfied with such taxation levels.

All speakers emphasized that wealth, after a certain level, doesn’t create happiness. But misery can be exacerbated by stark manifestations of inequality — the kind, for instance, that studies show lead to “air rage” on airplanes, when economy passengers are forced to walk through first-class cabins before being squeezed into their seats.

Charles Montgomery, Vancouver-based author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, lamented how the U.S. and China have been leading the way in constructing often-pricey, sterile cities, which make walking and bicycling almost impossible, promote long car commutes, exacerbate loneliness and have even been found to increase divorce rates.

Montgomery urges designing cities that help people connect. With Metro Vancouver enduring an unprecedented housing crisis, he referred to studies showing people in soaring apartment towers don’t report strong well-being.

Instead, he focuses on the “missing middle” in housing options. He presses for more cooperative living arrangements, such as dozen-unit buildings with a central courtyard for families to meet in and support each other.

“When it comes to happiness,” he said, “nothing matters more than our relationships with other people.”

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